Thomas Neurath
Thomas Neurath did not expect to be running Thames & Hudson, the family publishing firm, in his mid-twenties until his father Walter Neurath suddenly died in 1967. Neurath was already working there as an editor but his elevation only became visible when the sales director physically marched him into his father’s office, sat him down in the empty chair and said: “You’re in charge now.”
In a later interview, he admitted: “I can’t remember ever wanting to be a publisher, and then one day I was.”
His independent streak manifested itself early on after he left Charterhouse School. He went to Paris and ended up living at the “Beat Hotel” in the Latin Quarter, then famous as the temporary home of leading countercultural American poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs. Conditions were spartan. Hot water was provided only three times a week and the sheets changed on a monthly basis.
After family pressure, he returned to enrol at St John’s College, Cambridge, to study anthropology and archaeology. But after the glamour of his earlier adventures, he was off again to Vienna and Jerusalem, his father allegedly hiring private detectives to track him down. This time he accepted a position in 1961 as an editor at Thames & Hudson, remaining with the firm for the next 60 years as managing director and then chairman.
Building on the solid foundations of his father Walter, who jointly founded the company in 1949 with Eva Feuchtwang (later his second wife), it became the most influential and respected illustrated book publisher worldwide. As a homage to its cultural and commercial origins, it was named after the rivers of London and New York, though for several years correspondence would arrive addressed to Mr Thames and Mr Hudson.
The company has always been privately owned, Thomas’s sister Constance becoming art director in 1967 and his daughters Johanna and Susanna actively involved and still on the board. His stepmother Eva remained with the company as chairman — her preferred title — until her death in 1999. She arrived at the offices in her chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, which also accompanied her to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair as she was convinced that it enhanced the reputation of the firm to see her driven from her hotel suite to the Book Fair.
Thames & Hudson expanded considerably under Neurath’s control but always through internal growth rather than mergers or acquisitions. On several occasions he turned down such offers, remarking: “When you buy a company, everything that is brilliant about it can fall through your fingers like sand.”
While remaining focused on the publication of art books and museum catalogues, he broadened its perspective to include photography, fashion, religion and even children’s books. In 1961, a large-format series started called Great Civilisations with renowned historians such as John Julius Norwich, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Asa Briggs.
One of the most profitable ventures was the World of Art paperback series, published in 16 languages and now running into several hundred titles ranging from Old Masters to Art and Climate Change, boasting total sales upwards of 15 million copies. Under Neurath Thames & Hudson expanded from its original base of offices in London and then New York to include branches in Paris, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Given the high cost of publishing illustrated books, it was essential to have titles with international appeal to do deals with other publishers and also sell foreign rights in other languages. Even in his final days, after retiring as chairman four years earlier, he was still reading proofs of new books for publication in his private office just north of Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill.
Thomas Neurath was born in 1940 in Upper Boddington, Northamptonshire, where his Jewish parents stayed with the family of Captain David Margesson MP, then the chief whip in Churchill’s government and, by December 1940, secretary of state for war. Margesson’s wife had sponsored Walter Neurath and his wife, Marianne, who escaped from Vienna in 1938, where they were in hiding after appearing on a Gestapo hit list for anti-Nazi publishing activities.
He continued his profession with Wolfgang Foges, another Jewish refugee from Vienna, designing and producing the King Penguin series and then Britain in Pictures, which included authors such as George Orwell, John Betjeman and Rose Macaulay.
Thames & Hudson was launched in 1949 with the intention of being a “museum without walls”, which has remained the mission statement of the company. In an interview in The Times celebrating Thames & Hudson’s 60th anniversary in 2009, Neurath recalled that he grew up in “a terrifically Viennese household”, saying: “We spoke German when I was a boy. My grandparents, who had also come out of Vienna in 1938, lived in Hampstead, and they were all members of the Anglo- Austrian Society. Walter was on the fringes of the Fabian Society and all these interesting people were brought together by anti-Hitler sentiments.”
After Walter’s death, Neurath expanded the variety of titles published. In an interview in Paris in 2011, he recounted: “In my father’s view, only painting, architecture and sculpture counted as art in their own right … He thought of photography as lacking in seriousness and fashion as frivolous.”
Neurath published some of the greatest contemporary photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton and David Bailey. Not all books were considered suitable, including a stunning volume by Leni Riefenstahl of the Nuba tribe in Southern Sudan.
While Neurath was impressed with the content, he drew a line at publishing anything by Riefenstahl, who had been an admirer of Adolf Hitler. Over lunch at the White Tower in Bloomsbury, Neurath asked her what sort of man Hitler was and was taken aback by her unashamed reply: “He was the most exceptional and inspiring man I ever knew … Of course, he had the great misfortune to be in power at that particular time. I have never met anyone who had such a strong aura of energy emanating from him.”
He met his wife Gun Thor, a jewellery designer, while hitchhiking in the Peloponnese in the early Sixties and later they would regularly spend the summer months there. They married in 1962 and she survives him along with their two daughters.
Neurath remained as managing director until 2005, when he retired and became chairman until 2021. He was highly cultured, with a keen interest in classical music, history and literature with a wide circle of friends, including many distinguished central European refugees who fled Nazi Germany. He also maintained an eclectic group of friends from the music industry, including Andrew King and Peter Jenner, early managers of Pink Floyd. Tim Page, the Vietnam war photographer who featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, was also a close friend.
A voracious reader, he was fluent in German, French and Italian and could read Latin and ancient Greek. The last book he was reading before his death was the new edition of Franz Kafka’s diaries. One of his regrets was not to being able to read or speak Russian.
He maintained a company flat on the Left Bank of Paris and kept a cottage in the Cotswolds near Cirencester. His house in Highgate was so laden with books that carpenters had to be called in to reinforce the joists to prevent it from moving off its foundations.
Thomas Neurath, publisher, was born on October 7, 1940. He died on June 13, 2025, aged 84.
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